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PRIVATE SECTOR; The Smith in the Shadow at G.M.

IT is an early September morning at the Four Seasons Hotel, and Manhattan's power brokers are back from their summer vacations, posturing over caffe lattes and toast in the hotel restaurant, bragging about their latest deals. Among them, in this cavernous I. M. Pei room, Michael T. Smith sits quietly, picking at an egg-white omelet.

Mr. Smith, the mild-mannered chairman and chief executive of Hughes Electronics, hardly stands out among the Armani-clad bankers and other Upper East Side prima donnas. But for 14 years, Mr. Smith, now 56, has had a substantial role in transforming Hughes, once an anchor of Southern California's military industry, into a technology powerhouse and the third-largest provider of pay television in the United States, behind AT&T and Time Warner. Its best-known venture, DirecTV, already has more than nine million subscribers who receive programming in their homes using pizza-sized satellite dishes.

But the obscurity that he so enjoys, despite having held his titles since 1997, is about to end. General Motors, which acquired his company, the former Hughes Aircraft, in 1985 and still owns 100 percent of the company's assets (pay no attention to that tracking stock), is now seeking a partner for it. Several possible suitors have emerged, most notably Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, Disney and Microsoft.

Mr. Smith is well positioned to negotiate. He was part of the G.M. team that brokered the Hughes acquisition 15 years ago. More important, he has the ear of John F. Smith Jr., the G.M. chairman, who is also his older brother. The two have never truly worked together, Michael Smith said. They climbed the ranks independently, he said, and when the board named him to lead Hughes, his brother declined to vote.

Michael Smith appears happy to remain relatively unknown. ''I've always distinguished between rainmakers and doers,'' he said, his voice still thick with the accent he developed while growing up near Boston. ''A lot of people make headlines, but they don't really achieve anything.''

His subdued demeanor is unusual in an era when chief executives, especially of technology companies, are hailed as celebrities.

''He is not a charismatic leader,'' said Harry Pearce, the vice chairman of G.M., who has known him for 13 years. That sentiment is echoed by Mr. Smith's wife, Jane. ''If he came into a room, he's not the one who makes a big scene that he's there,'' she said.

But that was just the personality needed to soothe Hughes engineers who, when the company was owned by Howard Hughes, worked for years on projects free from demanding managers. ''Because he does things in a low-key way, they aren't intimidated,'' Mr. Pearce said.

Consider what happened in 1990, when Mr. Smith brought in a consultant to evaluate which of Hughes's technologies were worth pursuing. ''He called them a bunch of underachievers and that set off a rocket,'' Mr. Smith said.

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Mr. Smith made his point in a quieter way. He called a meeting and laid out several goals. If the engineers, virtually all of them Hughes shareholders, met them, he explained, Hughes's stock price would grow fourfold. ''That got them focused on what they needed to do,'' he said.

Born in 1943, Mr. Smith was one of four children in an Irish family. He spent afternoons at his family's ice cream shops, scooping cones. Like most other young boys in the neighborhood, he played ice hockey, paying $15 a day to practice at the local ice rink. Summer weekends were spent at a rented New Hampshire cabin where his aunts, uncles and cousins gathered. In 1965, he graduated from Providence College with a degree in political science.

Having belonged to the Reserve Officers Training Corps in college, Mr. Smith joined the Army as an intelligence officer. In 1966, during the Vietnam War, he spent his days roaming the South Vietnamese countryside interviewing villagers and looking for enemy camps. On Christmas Day in 1966, he recalled, a plane crashed in a village not far from an airport near Danang. When Mr. Smith went with a doctor and engineer to assess the damage, he saw that the crash had exposed a chain of tunnels built by enemy sympathizers.

''The people in the village were scared,'' he said. But not because they were found out. ''They were homeless.'' As he learned, ''There was a human side to the war.'' Such experiences helped him identify with other people's circumstances and their stakes in an issue.

When his wife first met him at a high school dance, she was not struck by his presence. But she noticed his quiet distinctiveness. ''I loved his sweater, a cardigan,'' Mrs. Smith said, noting that she still has it. ''It had multicolors and was different. He's an individualist.'' She laughed as she remembered the moment, adding, ''He's not motivated by what other people think.'' The two were married in 1966. They have had three children; one of them died recently in a hiking accident.

In 1968, after two years in Vietnam, Mr. Smith joined G.M., earning $7,800 a year working at the same plant in Framingham, Mass., where his brother had worked. His first job was in the accounting department, collecting workers' punched time cards and calculating their hours. Three years later, having earned an M.B.A. from Babson College at night, he moved to Detroit and joined the G.M. finance team. Then came New York City and Spain, before his return to Detroit in 1982 as assistant controller of the company. In 1986, after G.M. acquired Hughes, he went to El Segundo, Calif., where the company was based, to be its chief financial officer.

Mr. Smith was quiet about the plans for Hughes, except to say, ''I'm not ready to retire.'' But it is clear that he would like his own future to include more time in the sun. ''When you leave a place like Michigan'' for a place like Southern California, he said, ''you never think of snow again.''

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A version of this article appears in print on September 24, 2000, on Page 3003002 of the National edition with the headline: PRIVATE SECTOR; The Smith in the Shadow at G.M. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe